Dialing in my analog rig - Need help

Stops - it sounded pretty good tonight, but I know there's more there. I crank it up a notch tomorrow. I plan on rolling cables as well. It's still interesting though as I had this turtable dialed in by dealer with the VTA bottomed out!

I wonder how it would have sounded with the arm upside down?

I spent my evening creating a cat tree subwoofer enclosure. Don't laugh, it looks cool. I think I'm on to something..

Thanks Plato for your suggestions.

My AC is taken care of. Dedicated circuit 10AWG cyro'd romex to Furutech or Teslaplex receptacle (depending on setup). Digital and analog front ends to Power Plant Premier, amp to wall. I should rotate my power cords, mostly home brews but excellent wire and connectors.

The phono cable the dealer sold me was a "Blue Heaven". I think that's a Nordost cable? I'm afraid to look it up cause it might not be what I might have wished for. It was one of those "I'll take that turntable and oh, I need a phono preamp and a cable". Kinda dumb I know. I had no expertise so I was at the dealers mercy.

I was actually thinking about a solid state preamp such as the Pass XP20 although the Calypso line looks intriguing as does the Lamm LP2.

I won't do anything preamp wise until I get my new speakers which are in the final stages of being built - about 2 weeks out. I need to get a handle of a dialed in analog system and a broken in pair of speakers before deciding on preamp. Me thinks at this juncture tubes may be the ticket but my amp is a Pass X350.5. May not be a good match for tubes or so I'm told...

Wow, really good advice. You guys and gal rock. The GCPH sounded so bad I was convinced it was broken. I took it back. LOL! Even the dealer thought it was broken. The second unit of course sounded equally as bad. Then one day the sun rose, the clouds parted and light shined through as the music found some semblance of purity. I've broken in many a piece but yikes this phono pre was brutal.

Oil at the pivot point? Overhang? I got a lot to learn.

Elizabeth - ya, they just as well have faced the arm the other direction. Come to think of it, it might have sounded better...

I'm trying to determine what arm I have. How do you measure it? Total length or from the actual stem? Going to the VPI web site I still couldn't determine the model. No mechanical anti-skate, it's done with the tonearm wire. It measures 10.5 inches total lenth. The wires feed a JM Memorial box.

Sorry for the dumb question but now I want to know.

I can't for the life of me honestly say I can decern the difference in sound with different loading. I'm pretending to say that 100 ohms sounds about right, except of course the bit of high frequency harshness and general over the top brightness for lack of better term. It's just not warm of cuddly and I'm a nut about detail so I error towards lean.

I've researched the arm and come up with - nothing. Maybe it's a VPI classic 1? Doesn't say classic on the headshell though. This is a model 2005 Scoutmaster so I must assume that this is the original tonearm.

The VTA as I mentioned earlier was set (or not at all) to the very bottom of the travel. The arm angled upward. Who'd do that? Maybe that's why the table was traded in for a 10X more expensive model.

I've gotten some good advice leading me to the possibility of a known setup guru. Still wish to learn this craft myself.

Interesting stuff. I took another look at the relationship between the cartridge and the album. I still a ways to go to get the alignment right. So up it went a few turns more.

Now I know what is meant when they say "VTA on the fly".

Great. Nice. That tells me that my tonearm is inferior no? In order for me to adjust and realistically dial in the "sound", I'll need lightening adjustments, remove the coffee table and hope I don't trample Jr on the way to the sweet spot of the couch.

On the other hand, without this forum and the knowledgeable folks within, I'd be listening to a horribly compromised setup as the tonearm rested at the bottom of its travel.

Thanks for all your inputs. Very much appreciated!

So not having a OTF-VTA adjustment, is it wise to think about upgrading to an arm that allows easy adjustment on the VTA?

I have a VPI arm, not sure what model but it's part of the 2005 Scoutmaster I purchased used. Nothing upgraded from what I see. anti skate is via the tonearm wiring. That's ugly IMO from the start.

I noted some longer arms with VTA OTF for sale used here, like the 12.6 or 12.5, Valhalla wiring on some. What is an appropriate arm for a pretty high level system I seem to have assembled? I don't want to sell Jr. but I still need a preamp!

Doing some research i noted the the clamp is plastic. I have the proprietary ring but not the stainless steel clamp. Is that a big deal? The feet look pretty nice and I'm sure they're stock feet. I'll have to look up minifeet. They don't look "mini" to me :)

Thanks for the responses. I went back to check and raise the VTA on this arm. Boy did I find some trouble.

If VTA is relevant to the cartridge, and "looking" at the cartridge with my laser eyes, I decided to again raise the arm. Upon doing this the arm either got derailed or the adjustment took it off its pivot point. When I set the arm down the needle flattened. I lost it. I was sure I destroyed the cartridge. The needle looked ugly, flattened and off to one side. I told my wife I just destroyed a 2 thousand dollar cartridge. I then realized that the weight of the arm had severely altered. It took some time to figure out what had happened. It seemed that I had raised the arm sufficiently to bottom out the back of the arm to the adjuster. I had to lower the VTA to get things back to where I could adjust the tracking force correctly. The cartridge seems to have survived my ignorance. I haven't tried it yet. What a PIA. There's got to be a better way to adjust VTA on this arm.

Thanks stops, that's an easy look. As it is, I basically "rescued" my needle and took what the VPI would give me in terms of height where it seemed it lacked. I don't think I can go any higher which is odd to me.

Well I must be high anyway.

I've been in this hobby for 45 years. Occasionally you hit on something and want to stop the presses, cease all tweaking and wonder what is was you did right. Usually that is but a fleeting moment as we (or I) march on because, "that other recording is effed up and I gotta fix it too syndrome". I digress.

My sub came back from JL Audio, and in one piece even though the palette was broken.. I won't go there, FedEx sucks IMO.

With default settings on the sub, off I went. Last night it sounded way too good without touching the subs volume control. I had changed the location and created what I call the catroffer. It's my Fathom F113 built into the cat tree. It's cat and baby proof to boot. It sits on two large 4" thick slabs of solid marble. This is a new "sub" location to the room. I was listening through my PS Audio PerfectWave DAC using Bridge, streaming FLAC and oh my was I missing the lower octaves. As I mentioned earlier the MBL's only perform to 50Hz. Changing to vinyl means changing cables and I knew my extremely fragile cables were getting flakey so today I re-terminated the Furutech RCA's on both cables. Back to the room to hear my vinyl rig now armed with a sub. (Last time I used the sub is when I introduced the phono preamp to the sub and the sub said "I'm dead now fix me". So this is a new setup if you will).

I was listening to Shiny Toy Guns "Season of Poison" on the DAC/Bridge, a well recorded and melodic album in a hardcore way with dynamics to die for. You could destroy a lessor set of speakers with this title. It was awesome sounding and the sub wasn't even "dialed in". So I performed the SRO, used my iPhone audio tools, made some minor adjustments after I had a good response curve, I replayed through the DAC. It was a bit more controlled, certainly more tuneful but how will it sound through the vinyl medium? Oh ya, I had found a copy of "Season of Poison" on vinyl. What I expected was diminished dynamics and lost resolution but that's not what I heard. It was bigger, airier and more dynamic, yet easier on the ears. We weren't as tense in some dramatic passages as we were driving digital through the DAC. Nothing was lost. Amazing. Next up was Neil Young "Chrome Dreams II". We played the cut "Ordinary People". We've listened to this tune 5 dozen times and more. It's a great tune on a great album and well recorded in Neil Young fashion. But I gotta tell you it was one of those moments. We were swept away in the music. It was awesome. There's a lot going on in this tune but everything had it's place, every instrument, every note. Neil's voice was placed center, just behind the plane of the speakers and so real. The micro-dynamics, the nuances and the sense of individual instruments were more displayed through the vinyl medium as well. The hard to capture background vocal, just a muffled sentence really, was captured clearly, distinctly and with body and texture that simply doesn't exist on my cutting edge digital setup. It was revelatory. I could only grin ear to ear and at the end of the song, both Dad and I stood up and clapped. It was one of those moments.

So I have to believe that my setup, however crude, isn't that bad after all. I'm pretty fussy overall and generally pay attention to detail. There's just so much to learn in audio, even after all these years I guess that's what keeps me coming back to trying new things. After rebuilding my cables I cleaned them with G5 then add some pretty specialized oil that enhances and protects connections between cables. The cleaning process is something I perform on occasion so I cannot attest to whether this enhanced or helped my cause, I doubt it hurt.

I would like to be certain I'm at least as close as I can get to proper tracking, then as others suggested, leave it alone and enjoy the music.